For many of us the hardest part about working out is motivation. This could be due to the fact that you haven’t made fitness a priority; when you’ve always got something more important on your plate it’s all too easy to put your health on the back burner.
Or maybe you’ve been exercising diligently and you’re simply not seeing the results you want, a situation that can be frustrating and discouraging.
It could even be that you simply don’t find your exercise routine particularly challenging or fun.
Whatever your reasons for skipping the workout day after day, the truth is that you need to find ways to get motivated, and interval training can provide you with several benefits that might just move you to get your butt off the couch and into gear.
There’s nothing like pushing yourself to your physical limits and leaving it all on the field, so to speak, when you exercise. Not only does it make you feel like you accomplished something, but it also gets you one step closer to meeting your fitness goals, whether you’re shooting for 20-inch biceps, you want to bench press your own body weight, or you’re training for a marathon, just for example.
A good workout can boost endorphins, making you feel energized and amazing throughout the day, and it can also help you to sleep better at night. Unfortunately, it might have just the opposite effect, making you feel fatigued but amped up at the same time. If this is the case, you might be looking for a few good ways to recover and relax after an intense workout.
Heading off to the mountains for some winter sports fun is a great way to give your entire body a workout and get out of the gym and into the great outdoors. Winter sports are a great way to exercise and will strengthen your leg muscles as well as your core muscles, as long as you can avoid injuries skiing and snowboarding.
We know we are already past the holidays, but you can use these tips in-season as well, to try to build up your lower body and core strength and healthy throughout the season.
If you are weight training to build muscle, your biggest goal is to keep your body mass index in check. Body builders around the world will tell you that having the perfect, sculpted body is also about staying lean and keeping your body fat at a minimum.
To be pure muscle and no fat you have to find creative ways to exercise, but you also have to eat the right food. In order to sculpt your muscles, you need food with enough protein to keep you energized, but also food that helps burn fat – you also want to suppress those unwanted cravings.
Here are 5 great foods for burning fat and building muscle.
Oatmeal.
Oatmeal is the secret weapon for a lot of body builders that want to sculpt the perfect body. Eating oatmeal 1 to 2 hours before an exercise or weight lifting session will give you an adequate amount of sustained energy, which will allow you to work out longer. Oatmeal is also great at regulating your blood sugar levels, which can stave off cravings. It is also a great source of fiber, which can prevent your body from storing excess fat.
On some level, we all know that caffeine is not exactly good for us, at least not in large doses and certainly not when it comes from sugary sodas or coffee drinks loaded up with cream and sugar (Starbucks: proudly serving 10% coffee in every coffee drink!). But whether you’re a soda hound or you drink black coffee throughout the day, you’ve likely experienced side effects like the jittery high that keeps you working like mad for an hour followed by the comatose state that leaves you craving more.
Then there are the headaches that plague truly devoted caffeine enthusiasts who don’t get their fix in a timely manner. I haven’t personally experienced this, but I have no less than 5 friends or aquaintances that do.
However, imbibing a moderate amount of caffeine can actually have some benefits for the casual drinker. Aside from giving you that extra boost of energy and focus, it can also have healthy effects for those who have the proper enzymes to break it down efficiently, potentially reducing the risk for heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and even some forms of cancer, according to various studies.
It can also have an impact on your weight training routine.
I get plenty of questions in various comments throughout the website, but I also get comments and questions via the Project Swole Contact Form.
Generally I address those questions through e-mail, but often I do not have the time to reply to each and every question personally.
From now on I want to take a more proactive approach to answering Your Health Questions by posting them separately in the blog. This way we can be sure that everyone benefits from the Q & A.
Gillian Finnick wrote:
“Hi Steve. I know you don’t normally answer questions like this, but I’ve seen you address some female topics before, sometimes with female guest bloggers. Do you have any recommendations for taking care of my hair during a workout? I’m sick of getting my hair done then turning into a ball of frizz after just one workout. Please help!”
Response:
You are right Gillian, I don’t normally answer these types of questions, and in fact I can’t answer it right now. However, I have consulted with my fitness friend Heather who also happens to also be a hair dresser, and asked her to whip up a guest post with some tips. That being said, here you go!
How to Care for Fitness Hair
Whether or not you put a lot of time and effort into your daily beauty routine, the last thing you want to do is add to your regimen needlessly. And the truth is that intense exercise can leave your hair oily, frizzy, or worse, both. For women who spend a lot of money at the salon for a particular coif, this can be a deal-breaker. But what good is perfect hair if the body it rests on is less than ideal?
Looking and feeling your best and attending to your overall health is more important than your hair, but it’s funny sometimes how our priorities get jumbled up. In any case, you don’t have to pick one or the other. You can find ways to keep your locks looking sleek even when you exercise. Here are just a few tips and tricks that will help you to stave off the frizzies and avoid the oily mess that might otherwise be the result of intense activity.
Hitting a plateau can drive you insane. Some people take months just to bump their bench press up by five pounds. A plateau is a good indicator that there’s something about your routine that just isn’t working for you anymore, and it means that it’s time for a change. Adding barbell complexes to your routine is a great technique for breaking plateaus. Barbell complexes are difficult, requiring you to perform several barbell exercises in a row as one set with no rest in between sets.
Benefits of Barbell Complexes
As a form of cardio, barbell complexes have several benefits over traditional cardio workouts. Barbell complexes burn a ton of calories but do not release cortisol the same way traditional cardio does. Cortisol is a stress hormone partly responsible for inducing fat storage in the body. However, barbell complexes release anabolic hormones that help you cut fat, making barbell complexes a great tool for cutting fat while you get out of your plateau.
The time required for traditional cardio can also be a bit of a drag, clocking in at thirty minutes or more. Barbell complexes are very fast-paced, and depending on how many sets you do, you may finish in ten to fifteen minutes – half the time of traditional cardio.
Posted February 27, 2013 in Fitness Tips, Healthy LifestyleComments Off on 5 MORE Ways to Burn MORE Belly Fat During Exercise
One of the first places the average adult body stores spare fat is around the belly, and this can be a real nightmare for anyone trying to trim down their midsection.
You might think that you’re doing everything right when it comes to your diet and exercise regimen, and yet, for some reason you just can seem to shed the unsightly padding around your abdominals.
If this is the case, you could find that doing everything right is actually all wrong. Your lifestyle might be sabotaging everything.
Here are just a few tips and tricks that could help you to finally melt away the belly fat that’s been plaguing you for years. Sure, they say diet is responsible for 75% of your progress, but if you are doing everything else wrong, your lifestyle could derail 90% of your progress.
There’s something you might not know about type 2 diabetes: anyone can get it. The onset of this form of the disease need not be related to heredity, although instances in your family may raise your risk for developing diabetes. However, you should also know that the condition is not unavoidable, even if you do have a family medical history to contend with.
What is Diabetes?
Type 2 diabetes develops when there is too much sugar in your blood, a condition known as hyperglycemia. Normally, your body creates insulin that breaks down sugar so that it can be stored in cells and burned off as energy. But over time, excess fat in the body can reduce levels of insulin being produced and create an insulin resistance in cells.
While the main cause of type 2 diabetes onset is thought to be obesity, the truth is that you can have a slim physique with a high percentage of body fat. The point is that even people who don’t necessarily look like they’ll develop diabetes may be prone to the disorder. And lifting weights can definitely help to lower your risk.
How to Prevent Injuries that Will Derail Your Progress
Adding weight lifting to your workout routine on a weekly basis can offer the average fitness buff a world of benefits.
For one thing, it can make you stronger, as expected, helping you to overcome obstacles in other types of exercise (running faster, throwing farther, jumping higher, etc.). But it can also help you to create the physique you’ve been trying for (whether it’s bulking you crave or simply a frame that features better muscle tone) and even lose weight if that’s what you want (muscle burns more calories than fat). And that’s just the beginning.
Weight lifting, when done improperly, can also result in a slew of injuries, most of which can be easily avoided by warming up and cooling down, building up to greater weights or more reps over time, using proper form, listening to your body, and asking for help from a spotter.
Here are just a few common weight lifting injuries that are best avoided:
Gaining weight and gaining lean muscle are two entirely different things. While increasing the amount you eat will almost certainly lead to you putting on weight, it will not automatically ensure that you gain lean, aesthetically pleasing muscle mass.
In order to effectively build muscle, you need to combine the right physical exercise with the right fuel for that physical exercise. It is, therefore, vitally important to pay attention to the nutrients you put into your body and to understand the role that carbohydrates play in the muscle building process.
Physical Activity and the Role of Carbohydrates
In order to build the lean muscle you desire, you need to engage in resistance training which specifically targets the major muscle groups in the body. Examples of these types of exercises include barbell curls, bench presses and squats. It is best to avoid working the same muscle groups in consecutive days and working out three to four times a week is ideal.
In order to perform efficiently, you also need to provide your body with the right kind of energy. Although proteins, fats, vitamins and minerals all combine to provide different things, carbohydrates in particular play a large role in muscle building.
You may have heard about the many benefits of adding weight training to your current workout routine, or perhaps you’ve done your homework and debunked some of myths that were holding you back. Either way, you are about to embark on a new mission – to get PUMPED UP! Or ripped. Or shredded.
In any case, you are probably keen to start trying out weight machines at your gym and pumping iron with free weights and barbells. But before you begin your sojourn into the wide world of weight training it’s not a bad idea to cover the basics so that you don’t end up injuring yourself or others.
Here are just a few common mistakes that you’ll definitely want to avoid:
To optimize fat loss rather than weight loss, use the Project Shred diet plan for only 3 weeks, then scale back to a less restrictive meal plan. Be sure to use a workout routine like Fat Loss for Men or Fat Loss for Women, in order to maintain muscle mass during your weight loss phase.
Many women have misconceptions when it comes to the prospect of adding a weight routine to their exercise regimen.
For example, there seems to be a common myth that lifting weights will transform you into a bodybuilder, laden with bulky muscles. Although this is indeed a goal for some women, it takes a lot more than lifting weights to bulk up.
Ladies, you shouldn’t allow these virtually baseless rumors to hold you back, especially considering the many benefits you stand to gain by adding weights to your fitness routine.
Rather than paying heed to rumors, you might want to first discover just what will happen when you start lifting weights, and here are some positive side effects that could just have you heading for the weight bench, or more likely for the squat rack, the next time you go to the gym.
Here are 5 benefits of weight lifting for the girls:
Remember, building muscle does not mean getting huge. It actually means elevating your metabolism, tightening your buns, and firming your abs.
Many people like the energy boost that they get from exercising early since it stays with them throughout the day and leaves them pleasantly sleepy at night. But if you’re not an early riser, you might find that you prefer working out during your lunch break or in the evening, despite the fact that it can leave you pumped up and unable to snooze when your head hits the pillow.
Of course, you may find that exercising later in the day presents you with myriad problems. Perhaps you’re too tired or demands on your time inevitably pop up, preventing you from getting in your workout.
In any case, you might end up deciding that starting your day with a workout is the best way to go. However, it can definitely be difficult to roll out of bed an hour earlier than usual, even if you’re committed to making it work.
So here are a few strategies that should help you find the motivation you need to exercise first thing in the morning.
For some reason, people seem to harbor the misconception that turning fifty means you’re old. In truth, it wasn’t really so long ago that the average life expectancy was about fifty-five, but thanks to modern medicine and advancing technology, many people now live to be far older than that. A growing awareness about the role diet and exercise play in human longevity hasn’t hurt, either.
What’s truly astonishing is how many people still believe that there is ever a time in life when it’s too late to start paying attention to your relative state of health and making changes that can benefit you for the rest of your life.
While you might not be surprised to see those in the 50+ category changing their diets to lower blood pressure or cholesterol, it’s likely that you’ll register wonder that your contemporaries are starting a workout routine.
The honest truth is that exercise at any age has the power to transform you if you go about it in the proper way. So here are a few tips to help you get the physique you seek, even if you’re starting to get letters from AARP.
Kinesiology is ostensibly the study of human movement, but there’s a lot more to it than looking at variations in gait or the way people tilt their heads. In fact, kinesiology, as a science, tends to be far more concerned with how an in-depth knowledge of movement, including the interdependent roles of physiology, psychology, and body mechanics, pertains to the study of human health, including applications for physical therapy, rehabilitation, and orthopedics, just to name a few areas of potential benefit.
So why might someone be interested in obtaining such a degree? And how can you go about getting one that is the most likely to net you your dream job?
Here are a few pointers to help you obtain the degree in kinesiology that’s right for you.
Enhance Sports Performance with Resistance Training
Most athletes do whatever exercises are most beneficial for their sport of choice. Often, the focus of a workout regimen is geared towards the demands of the sport in question.
For example, marathon runners train by running, while cyclists – you guessed it – train by riding their bikes. But whether you play soccer or basketball, you’re big on Parkour, or your idea of a good time includes a kayak and white-water rapids, you may find, at some point that your training sessions are not delivering the results that they used to. Or perhaps you’ve found that you can’t seem to get over a personal plateau with a pure cardio routine.
Whatever the case, you may eventually come to the realization that adding weight training to your efforts could be beneficial to your overall health and fitness, taking you to the next level with whatever form of athletics you prefer. And here are just a few benefits that should help convince you to take the leap and lift some weights.
When most women picture their ideal physique, there are a few body parts that are always the main focus in many ladies mind. A tight and toned mid-section, arms, legs and last but not least; their derriere. Female Fitness competitors such as Larissa Reis and pop stars such as Shakira have a back side that is desired by many women. Many a women also have the desire to have beautiful built glutes to show off in their bikinis, dresses, underwear or just about anything to show off their physique.
If you have a million and one questions and just simply feel lost amongst all the information or simply don’t know where to start, then hopefully this article will be perfect for you. With good research combined with personal experience this article shall be the saving grace you have needed.
Anatomy of The Glues:
To achieve a well-shaped and curved butt it is important to know basic information on the anatomy of the glutes. The glutes are made up of three muscles, which all need to be targeted.
Gluteus Minimum: The gluteus minimus is the smallest and deeper of all the muscles.
Glueteus Medius: This covers the outer surface of the pelvis.
Gluteus Maximus: The biggest muscle of the gluteus muscle group, which contributes to the main muscle mass of the glutes.
For many of us the hardest part about working out is motivation. This could be due to the fact that you haven’t made fitness a priority; when you’ve always got something more important on your plate it’s all too easy to put your health on the back burner.
